Point to where the sky is blue

Jan. 12th, 2011

Jan. 12th, 2011

My job as office junior involves many many things, mostly just doing whatever I'm told to do. This ranges from setting up £300,00.00+ in supplier payments each week to making tea for the boss. Today I've been doing my favourite - internet research. My Dearly Beloved Boss is planning to move to France for six months and there's a lot he wants to know. So I've spent the morning prowling the internet, printing reams of stuff and highlighting the relevant bits. And I've been named the dog's Fairy Godmother for the information I've found on taking her to live in France. There are days when I do enjoy my job.

I'm in a good positive mood today so I'm going to ramble about that a bit. I've just finished reading The Order of the Phoenix and am now getting into the Harry Potters that I don't remember very well because I read them the day they came out, in a hurry, and haven't reread since. I say I don't remember them very well. I hardly remember them at all.

Anyway, I've brushed my teeth so I'm feeling minty and proud. I've had a text exchange with Mandy about Brownies and discovered an email from her - seems she's noticed I was acting odd last year. I've admitted to her that things weren't quite right and told her that I'm lots better now and she's coming over for lunch tomorrow and we'll talk about Brownies and she'll talk and I'll nod and fail to get a word in.

Partly the improvement has come about because the moment I decided to give up on people I got an out-of-the-blue invitation to spend a day with my two best friends and it actually happened and I enjoyed it. This has gone no little way to restoring my faith in people, as has Mandy's email. But something that I think has made a particularly noticeable difference is work.

I've had a busy fortnight. Everyone's piling stuff of me and telling me it needs to be done sort of now. And I admit, it's getting to the point where it's almost too much and I very nearly started snapping at people today. We had two new people back in November. One of them has taken 75% of my accounting jobs and the other has kind of taken my place as the logistics backup. (I don't think he's staying past his trial period. He's not good enough and he admitted himself within two weeks of starting that he doesn't really want to stay). For a while, I felt like all my jobs were being taken away, like I was gradually being made redundant, I'd had a massive problem with some shipping documents I hadn't sorted out that dragged on for two months, I felt like I was rubbish at my job and I was living in terror of being fired. This was a completely misplaced paranoia. I said here, for crying out loud, my boss said a while back, probably in September/October, if I was happy here he had no problem whatsoever keeping me. That was probably around the time my "occasional bouts of misery" were at their most persistent, maybe he'd noticed and thought I wasn't happy here. What he said was that if I wasn't happy and wanted to leave, they'd find a replacement who could do all the stuff I could do while they were hiring. But if I was happy then he had no problems keeping me. I know I've already said that. It bears repeating. I should have paid more attention to the second bit than the first bit. He said months ago that he had no intention of getting rid of me, didn't he? But paranoia piled upon misery and I took it the wrong way and let it make things so much worse.

These last two weeks, as I've said, I've been incredibly busy. I've been working to breaking point. I've finally realised it was a good thing the accounts stuff was taken away. It reduced my workload down to "manageable". God knows what state I'd be in if I was trying to keep up with the accounting on top of everything else. Well done bosses for knowing things I didn't, even about myself. But the point is that I'm delighted to be busy because it's stuff I can cope with, provided I don't end up wasting too many days in unnecessary meetings and it's stuff that I'm needed for. I feel useful, I feel needed, I feel like there is definitely a job for me and without me, the office would be in a certain amount of chaos. I'm essential. They don't get rid of "essential".

Realising that I'm in demand means paranoia about potential firing has gone. Friends contacting me eases the loneliness. I don't know what happened to me over the last few months but I'm definitely well on my way back to my normal self. And that's a great thing. I'm reading! I'm intending to go snowboarding! (Tried to go last week. Drove seventeen miles there to find the slope was closed because of technical problems. Drove seventeen miles home again. 17 miles, incidentally, would seem like another world to some of my friends. I'm genuinely curious - does anyone think it's a ridiculous distance to go snowboarding? Not that your opinion is going to stop me going, obviously)